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19 August 2013 From Amazon Pasture to the high street: deforestation and the Brazilian cattle Product Supply Chain
Abstract

Brazil has the world's highest annual area of tropical deforestation, and cattle ranching is the largest driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Recent domestic and international market demand for beef and leather that are not linked to deforestation led the largest Brazilian meatpackers to adopt policies to reject supplies from ranches with recent deforestation. However, increased and sustained enforcement of such policies will be needed to reduce deforestation in these supply chains over the long-term. We sought to map the Brazilian cattle product supply chain to determine the proportion of the market, and of cattle production, that may be susceptible to market demands for deforestation-free supplies. Beef, leather and live animal exports are the most valuable products from the cattle industry, with export values tripling between 2001 and 2009, and with China, Russia and the U.S. as the largest importing countries. The markets for dairy and tallow (beef fat) are predominantly domestic. We find that around 40% of beef and 85% of leather production serve markets that have expressed concerns over environmental impacts of their purchases, while the clandestine market, which is not susceptible to market environmental demands, is estimated to comprise about one quarter of the Brazilian cattle slaughter. Demand for Brazilian cattle products is growing, and while market-driven efforts to reduce deforestation linked to legal slaughter have shown success, improved governance and other measures will be needed to tackle the environmental impacts of the clandestine industry.

© 2013 Nathalie F. Walker, Sabrina A. Patel and Kemel A. B. Kalif This is an open access paper. We use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ - The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and source of the work. The license ensures that the published article will be as widely available as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers. Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.
"From Amazon Pasture to the high street: deforestation and the Brazilian cattle Product Supply Chain," Tropical Conservation Science 6(3), 446-467, (19 August 2013). https://doi.org/10.1177/194008291300600309
Received: 9 July 2011; Accepted: 27 March 2012; Published: 19 August 2013
KEYWORDS
Brazilian Amazon
cattle
deforestation
leather
sustainable markets
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